Fellowship presentation: Bird Lovers

Speakers: Luke Hickey, Russell McGregor

Luke Hickey:

Yuma. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Luke Hickey. I'm the Assistant Director-General of the Engagement Branch. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nation peoples, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land. I give my respects to Elders, past and present. And through them to all Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Luke Hickey:

Thank you for attending this event, coming to you live from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, for those of you who are watching online. It's wonderful to be able to welcome live audiences back into library after quite a long hiatus, and it's really terrific to have people here, a live audience, as well as those watching online. This afternoon's presentation is by adjunct professor, Russell McGregor, 2021 National Library of Australia Fellow whose fellowship is funded in memory of Averill Edwards, a former library staff member. With last year's COVID lockdowns, the completion of Russell's fellowship was delayed slightly. But we are very pleased that he's been able to complete the research for this year for his project, Bird Lovers: A History of Birdwatching Passions. Russell is an adjunct professor of history at James Cook University and the author of several award-winning books. His latest, Idling in Green Places: A Life of Alec Chisholm, was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. And as befits his fellowship project, Russell is a passionate bird watcher.

Luke Hickey:

Russell's research at the national library has focused on compiling a history of birdwatching in Australia from the late 19th century through to the present day and drawing on a wide diversity of sources from the Library's collection. This presentation will not only highlight the changes in birdwatching practice over the years, but also look at the rise of an environmental ethos and ways in which settler Australians have embraced nature to cultivate a sense of national belonging. Please join me in welcoming Russell McGregor.

Russell McGregor:

Thanks, Luke. And thank you all for coming. Birds express all that is beautiful, joyous, and free in nature. That's the opening sentence of Neville Cayley's What Bird is That? published in 1931. They delight our eyes, charm our ears, quicken our imagination and through association with the bushland inspire us with the profound love of country. Even the non-birders among you, that's probably most of you, will have heard of Cayley's book. It's now an Australian classic and has been reissued in so many revised editions and renovated formats that it's hard to keep count. What Bird is That? is a field guide, a book to help you match a flighty feathery creature with a name. Compared to the field guides available to us today, Cayley's isn’t very good. The plates are crowded, the pictures tiny, the descriptions exasperatingly terse and the physical book ill-suited to roughing it in the field.

Russell McGregor:

But at the same time, it's a wonderful book, well-deserving it's now classic status, because it's not merely an instrument facilitating the matching of a bird with a name. Beyond that, Cayley gives voice to the passions of bird watching. His introduction continues from where I left off, what visions of freedom and joy come to us when we see a flock of Scarlet Honey-eaters feeding among the blossoms of a tea-tree, a Spinebill sipping nectar from a native fuchsia, a Blue Wren moving among the golden beauty of a wattle-tree or Silver Gulls flying lazily above the limpid blue waters of our harbours? What pleasure is ours when we hear the joyful carefree caroling of Magpies at dawn, the springtime song of the Gray Thrush, the wonderful song mimicry of the Lyretail or the Song-lark soaring heavenwards, filling the air with its melody. Cayley's words encapsulate the emotive and aesthetic aspects of birding which have endured through to the present day.

Russell McGregor:

As a birder myself, Luke's already told you that I am, but I suppose it's obvious that anyone doing this research project would have to be. But as a birder, it's the emotional aesthetic aspects that most sustain my interest. Among birders, and many other people for that matter, there's a notion that birds are magical creatures, their ability seemingly to defy gravity, floating and flouting on thin air, their gorgeous plumage and glorious songs, their behaviour that veers sometimes sharply between cute and confronting, their possession of characters so like, and yet, so unlike our own. These make birds into enchanting creatures. People have long found them so. Bird watchers merely go a few steps further and actively seek to be enchanted.

Russell McGregor:

There's also a scientific side to bird watching and Neville Cayley promoted that too. Like other birders of his day, he urged people to make precise observations, write them down promptly, collate them and contribute their findings to ornithological associations and publications. Today we call it citizen science, with birders submitting their observations to global scientific repositories, such as eBird via apps on their phones. The title and the technology are new, but recreational birders contributing to ornithological science continues a long tradition. There are other historically interesting aspects of birding. It's strong and enduring conservationist stance for example. In the history of bird watching that I'm writing, these other aspects, its scientific side, it's conservationist and social dimensions will receive due attention. But my fellowship here at the National Library took the title, Bird Lovers: A History of Birdwatching Passions. So in this talk, I'll keep some focus on the emotional and aesthetic aspects of birding, but don't expect the focus to be tight.

Russell McGregor:

As my title suggests, many of the relevant emotions are positive, loving birds, cherishing them, adoring, admiring, and appreciating birds as in the passages I've quoted from Cayley's field guide. But the emotions of birding, like those of all human activities are not all positive. Some birders feel revulsion against, even despise certain birds, often introduce species like sparrows and starlings, sometimes aggressive natives like Noisy and Bell Miners. Like the latter-named species, birders can be competitive, combative and quarrelsome. It doesn't take long acquaintance with the history of bird watching bodies to realise that they're riven with faction and discord, usually over issues, utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. Even loving birds has not always aligned smoothly with birders other passions, such as their dedication to studying birds, especially when as was once the case, studying them entailed shooting them and robbing their nests.

Russell McGregor:

The tensions between the myriad passions of birding deserve and get due attention in what I'm writing as do the emotional entanglements of birding with other enterprises and ambitions. Bird watching, I believe, is fundamentally driven by passion, emotion. In that regard, we can see birding as a manifestation of modern urban people's craving for communion with nature. Of course that's not birding's only motivation. Beyond it lie a whole muddle of motives, from a thirst for knowledge to a love of lists, from the twitcher's competitive compulsion to score the biggest tally of sightings to the aesthete's appreciation of avian melodies in a dewy dawn. Yet connecting with nature is, and always has been a powerful impetus behind bird.

Russell McGregor:

My research is historical. I'm a historian by profession. Well, I was until I retired some years ago. But somehow as before, I still seem to spend my time hanging around libraries and archives, searching out stuff about the past. As a historian, I trace changes as well as continuities in the practices of birding over time. The passions of birding have certainly changed as have birders modes of expressing and communicating them. But there's also been a high level of continuity as demonstrated by the quoted passages from Cayley, now over 90 years old. His wording is not quite how we might frame such things today, but it's close and his evident feeling for birds even closer. The period I'm surveying is from around the turn of the 20th century to now. There's no definitive date for the beginning of bird watching, but a pastime and practice recognisably similar to birding today emerged around the end of the 19th century.

Russell McGregor:

It wasn't then quite the same as it is now. I've already mentioned that collecting, that is killing birds and robbing their nests was once prominent practice amongst birders. The decline of those practices and the drivers of that decline are among the topics I'm examining. Nevertheless, the sufficient commonality between birding today and birding around the turn of the 20th century and sufficient difference to what went before, to date the beginnings of modern birding to around that time. And that's the consensus too among historians and bird watching in the USA, in the UK, where that topic has attracted a lot more attention than it has here. To an end date as to many things, there's no better time than the present. Originally I planned to take my research only up to the 1960s. That's sensible in some ways, because there were some significant changes after that time and a more circumscribed time period can help avoid the common problem of historical research lurching off into infinity.

Russell McGregor:

But there's too much juicy stuff after the 1960s. To take just one example, it was only after then, probably in the late 70s, early 80s, that the practice now known as twitching took off in Australia. With its obsessive compulsion, to see rare and out of place birds to score and every increasing list and its marvellously inventive repertoire of lists, lists of birds seen, seen in Australia, seen in the world, in my garden, in my neighbourhood, my state, my region, and so forth, even birds seen on TV. Twitching is too wonderfully fertile a topic to avoid in the history of bird watching passions.

Russell McGregor:

Most of my research is with written documents of one kind or another from here in the National Library and elsewhere. I also talk with birders and those talks will have a significant contribution to my writings on the topic. But most of my time is spent with my nose in a book or journal or newspaper or letter or diary or some other papery preserver of words. I guess that's the stereotypical image of a historian, and I'm old enough to reinforce the stereotype without inhibitions. Here in the National Library, the array of documentary sources is superb, verging on overwhelming. Actually it is overwhelming at times, but that's a boon. Thanks again to the library for facilitating my access to those documents via the fellowship and to the Library staff, through ensuring that everything run smoothly. I won't subject you to a comprehensive rundown of the documents I've examined, but I'd like to take you on a ramble through some of them and the people who created them. Focusing on the first 50 years or so of bird watching in Australia.

Russell McGregor:

It's a ramble, not a dissertation, but a ramble can be more interesting than a power walk, and maybe we can learn more from it. I hope it reveals not only some of what my fellowship here has entailed, but also something about what makes bird watches tick, although the birders among you will know that within the past time tick has another meaning. Let me begin then with this guy in the front centre of the main photo. He was one of Australia's earliest birders, Archibald James Campbell, born 1853, died 1929. His papers are here in the national library. Among his many birding achievements is that he took the first photograph of an Australian bird species in the wild, Crested Terns, photographed on Direction Islet, off Rottnest Island, Western Australia on 21st, November 1889. That puts it among the earliest photographs taken of wild birds anywhere in the world.

Russell McGregor:

A pioneer photographer, Campbell was also a keen collector of eggs and bird skins. In time, photographing birds would supersede collecting them, except for closely circumscribed scientific purposes. The camera along with binoculars and field guides would by sometime 1930s there about displace the gun from the birders kit. But for Campbell and fellow birders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographs were a supplement to the skin and egg collection rather than a replacement for it. They still put primary value on their collections and photographs were mere convenient images of those tangible objects. It would be some decades before possessing the image came to be valued over possessing the object itself.

Russell McGregor:

Campbell's writings are suffused with a strong aesthetic appreciation of birds. His major book, Nest and Eggs of Australian Birds, published 1900 is about much more than what the title specifies. Its pages are filled with celebrations of birds in all their glory, their appearance, songs, behaviour habits, beauty, and charm. They also recount Campbell's collecting exploits and readers today might find jarring the books, conjunction of delight in bird life and relish in robbing their nests. Among the many photos is this one of the egg collecting enterprise itself, a wonderful shot of a naked man climbing out of a swamp up into a tree to collect a wood ducks nest. The photographer was Campbell. I don't know who the climber was.

Russell McGregor:

Nonetheless, the photograph captures the flavour of robust masculine adventure so characteristic of ornithological collecting. Few collectors were women. Another aspect of Campbell's work that might jar with readers today comes at the end of his introduction to Nests and Eggs. ‘My doxology,’ he proclaimed, ‘no work should be complete without praise to God and perhaps more especially no natural history work.’ A devout Presbyterian, he followed the old dictum that the study of natural history revealed the glory of God's handiwork. That belief was being whittled away during Campbell's lifetime under the combined pressures of Darwinian evolutionism and the secularisation of society. But a core assumption survived and still survive today, that by engaging us with nature, bird watching can offer spiritual uplift to modern, urban people.

Russell McGregor:

Campbell was one of the most active and prominent founders of the Australasian Ornithologists Union in 1901 and the Bird Lovers Club four years later. As such, he was a crucial figure in putting Australian bird watching on firm institutional foundations. Those bodies survive today, now combined under the name BirdLife Australia. The photograph taken in 1921 shows Campbell as an elderly man flanked by two other notable ornithologists of the day. On his right, stands an intense Neville Cayley. We've already encountered him as the author of What Bird is That? On his left is an ebullient, Sidney Jackson. I'll turn to him now. Sid Jackson was a professional collector of skins and eggs, lived from 1873 to 1946. Indeed, he was one of the most skilled and successful ornithological collectors in Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among other achievements, he collected the first specimen of a female rufous scrub-bird from the rainforest of the Lamington Tablelands in Queensland in 1919. That is, he shot it, skinned it and preserved the skin with liberal doses of arsenic.

Russell McGregor:

But he was also a bird watcher who gained immense pleasure from looking at birds. He loved the birds he saw. That's one of the strongest themes that emerges from the pages of the beautifully handwritten diaries of his collecting expeditions held here in the national library. He meticulously listed the birds he saw at each location, and the vast majority were never the target of his collector's gun. While traveling by train, coach or car, and his profession necessitated a lot of travel, his favourite recreation was to identify and list the birds he saw just like birders do today.

Russell McGregor:

So Jackson was a man who loved and admired birds, but he also shot them and collected their eggs for a living. The contrariety of his activities embodies some of the multiple themes that thread through the history of bird watching. And that I aim to capture in what I'm writing. Birding history like all history is filled with both continuities and contraries. Jackson was contrary in other wonderful ways too. He was a portly gentleman weighing 16 stone or 102 kilos, but an expert and agile tree climber. His contemporaries marveled at the fact that such a corpulent man, corpulent was the polite term in those days, could scale tall trees with apparent ease. He and his brother, Frank, would climb trees up to 30 meters and more in search of nests and eggs, and in search of photographs. For Jackson, like Campbell, was a pioneer bird photographer. Tree climbing was then an essential part of bird photography, and the extent to which birders risked life and limb climbing to dizzying heights is amazing.

Russell McGregor:

His photographs show not only birds and the hazards of collecting them, but also the difficulties and inconveniences of the photographic enterprise at the time, as in this one of his makeshift campsite darkroom in Western New South Wales in 1911. Jackson acknowledged that he was tutored in tree climbing by Aboriginal people and he paid special tribute to a man named Nimboy Jack from the Clarence River District in Northern New South Wales. Sid and his brother Frank sometimes use Aboriginal climbing techniques, such as cutting notch, toeholds with a tomahawk and descending the tree using a looped vine. They also used other devices, climbing spurs, ropes and poles, and in 1895, Sid devised a special rope ladder to facilitate his collecting enterprises. His and Frank's exploits with the ladder are jaw dropping in the picture here, down the bottom here, that's Sid Jackson. This guy there, that's his brother, Frank, at the nest of a Whistling Kite, Whistling Eagle it was called then.

Russell McGregor:

Sid Jackson's diaries, make fascinating reading. They record in meticulous detail, not just what he did, but also his subjective state while doing it. They document his thoughts, emotions, and observations, and communicate his personality, attitudes, hopes and fears. Jackson talked to his diaries and by doing so, made them far more than mere matter-of-fact narratives. His diaries bring back to life the day to day experiences of a birder of a by gone age.

Russell McGregor:

By the 1920s birding was changing and the collecting of skins and eggs by amateur birders was becoming increasingly controversial. Indeed, in the interwar years, disagreements over the ethics of amateur collecting were among the fiercest disputes among birders. Those disputes weren't confined to Australia. They were conducted with equal ferocity in America, in Britain suggesting that some bigger transformation of attitudes toward the killing of living things was underway. Improvements in field glasses, binoculars, and the advent of field guides helped drive a shift towards observing rather than collecting. Australia acquired its first field guide in 1911, with the publication of J.A Leach's An Australian Bird Book, from which the illustration there is taken. Also impelling that same change was the camera. Many of the new generation of bird photographers did not combine photography with collecting as their predecessors had done, but explicitly repudiated the latter in favour of the former.

Russell McGregor:

They urged that the bad old days of shooting birds with a gun must give way to a new era in which shooting would be only with a camera. I'll exemplify with the words of two of Australia's best bird photographers of the 1920s and 30s, R.T Littlejohns and S.A Lawrence, who in their wonderfully titled book of 1920, Birds of Our Bush, or Photography For Nature-Lovers, wrote, and I'll read it out. Our chief argument in favour of photography as a means of observation is that the photographer in gaining his ends, need leave no trail of destruction in his wake, the collector, whether he shoots the birds or takes their eggs, has only desolation in one form of another upon which to pride himself, should he contemplate the result of his day's work. The photographer on the other hand, leaves or should leave, his subjects just as he found them and no worse for his interference. He may go back again if he wishes to observe the progress of his friends or to picture some new phase of their lives.

Russell McGregor:

Their book replete with such pleas is testament to how novel such an approach then was, although it's now taken for granted. But bird photography, 1920s and 30s, and later for that matter, was not for the fainthearted. Lacking telephoto lens, these photographers engaged in heroic tree climbing just as their egg collecting forebears and contemporaries did, or if the trees were not suitable to climb, they erected makes shift structures to get them up close to the nest. Because of the technological limits of the day, birds were virtually always photographed at or near a nest. It's the only place where they sat still enough. The photo depicts Alec Chisholm and a friend trying to photograph a Crested Strike-tit nest at its nest unsuccessfully, as it turned out. The illustration provided the frontispiece for Chisholm's first and probably still his best known book, Mateship With Birds, published in 1922.

Russell McGregor:

The title, Mateship With Birds, flaunts Chisholm's message that the Australian people should bond emotionally with the birds around them for their own sake, as well as that of the birds. Inside the book's covers, that message was persistently reaffirmed. In lavish prose, profuse with imagery and studded with stanzas of quoted verse, he urged his readers to open their hearts to their avian compatriots and embrace them as friends and fellow Australians. In this, as in his prolific other writings, Chisholm sought to nurture in the public an emotional intimacy with Australian birds. Through such intimacy, he hoped people would come to value, not just the birds, but also the plants, animals, and landscapes of this country, seek to conserve them and make them intrinsic to their national identity.

Russell McGregor:

The same themes suffuses Chisholm's 1932 book, Nature Fantasy in Australia, which was devoted to birds and bird watching in Sydney and surrounds. Setting the tone, its frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned, ‘The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honey-eater at nest in a suburban garden.’ And because I'm still waiting for the copy of that frontispiece, I had to substitute my own photo of the Scarlet Honey-eater, but that has to do. The fact that this gorgeous little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians ready access to the wonders of nature. Some years later, he published News From Nature, celebrating the same accessibility for the residents of Melbourne.

Russell McGregor:

Chisholm explained to the readers of Sydney's Telegraph in 1932, that they did not have to, in his words, crawl into all manner of corners in order to see birds at their best. The joys of birding were easily accessible to all, he enthused, and could rejuvenate the souls of city people. In his characteristically lavish style, Chisholm lauded birding as a mean to, his words, open the spiritual eye that develops when you come to regard the flash of a wing or the snuggling of a small mother on a nest as one of the most gracious things outside Utopia.

Russell McGregor:

That's emblematic of the emotive strands that thread so prominently through the writings of Chisholm and fellow birders, past and present. But for the moment I want to stick with the point that lots of birding is and always has been done in the near urban areas. It's a fact, I suspect that you residents of Canberra must be continually reminded of with the amazing diversity of bird life in your suburbs. In fact, I think Canberra must be the most birdy city I've ever been to. For the past two decades, the national birding organisation, BirdLife Australia, has run a program called Birds in Backyards, conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count, which draws tens of thousands of eager participants. According to BirdLife, it's one of Australia's biggest citizen science events.

Russell McGregor:

It's name is new as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific data sets, but birding in backyards, like citizen science itself is far from novel. 100 years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette, Maybanke Anderson, was a keen bird watcher who did most of his birding in his own garden, in the Northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes he backyard birded alone, sometimes in company with notable birders of the day like Keith Hindwood, Alex Chisholm and Norman Chaffer. All of them not only admired Wahroonga bird life, they meticulously recorded it and published their suburban ornithological studies in the EMU. A glance at the contents page of that journal in the early decades of the 20th century will reveal numerous studies of urban birds, citizen science of an earlier age.

Russell McGregor:

The huge volume of material on urban birds and birding illuminates some important aspects of bird watching history. I'm particularly interested in how it shows that although bird watching is by definition, a nature based recreation, the nature it cherishes encompasses the homely everyday nature where we live as well as the more remote places we like to imagine as approximating a state of nature. Of course, birders like to seek special species in Cape York and Costa Rica and other sites of excitement, in times gone by when long distance travel was more difficult and exotic places less accessible. Well, that's a scenario that COVID seems to have gone some way to restoring, but then keen bird watches did travel to see birds, but then as now, most birding was done close to home. That may be often for practical reasons. Most of us can't afford to spend too long, too far from home, but it also underlines the fact that birds can be found and admired almost anywhere.

Russell McGregor:

Birding as I've said, is a means for modern people to connect with nature, and the nature it connects us with encompasses the everyday nature in your home as well as those environments we consider more pristinely natural. Birders treasure wild birds, but that just means birds that aren't caged or domesticated. Wild birds are ubiquitous or very nearly so. Bird watching puts people in touch with the wild near home. That's a wonderfully resonant phrase I think. The wild near home. I've borrowed it from the American environmental historian, Thomas Dunlap, who wrote a book on the history of bird watching in America, based on his studies of the numerous field guides that were published there from 1880s onwards. It wouldn't be possible to write a history of bird watching in Australia, at least not a book length study on that basis because Australia had two field guides be before the 1970s. So I've had to cast my research net a lot wider, which isn't a bad thing.

Russell McGregor:

I've circled back to field guides where I began with Cayley's, What Bird is That? And I want to reiterate the point that Cayley's field guide added successes, including the many that today you can conveniently consult on your mobile phone. I was giving Luke a little demonstration of that just before we started. But field guides are not mere instruments allowing a name to be pinned to a bird. They're entry points into a world that touches ours, enriches it, and yet remains apart from it. Naming the bird is just a first step toward appreciation. Let me conclude with some reflections on one of the new generation of field guides, Graham Pizzey's Field Guide to the Birds of Australia. First published 1980. Strongly influenced by the great American field guide innovator, Roger Tory Peterson, there. This is Pizzey. Pizzey is here. Roger Tory Peterson and his wife, Barbara, and an Argentinian birder on the other side.

Russell McGregor:

Anyway, Pizzey's work was strongly influenced by Roger Tory Peterson, and I'd have to say Pizzey's field guide is my personal favourite. Befitting the modern field guide, its introduction carries no patch of purple prose as Cayley's did. Pizzey gets straight to the business of identifying birds. But we know that he wrote the book for more than purely instrumental purposes, for more than merely helping people name a bird. We know this because he was such a prolific writer, publishing innumerable books, magazine, and newspaper articles in which he expounded his love of birds and his understanding of bird watching as a means of connecting people with nature.

Russell McGregor:

I know it also, because during my fellowship, I read in the papers of Francis Ratcliffe, held here in the national library. I read correspondence between Pizzey and Ratcliffe, Ratcliffe was a CSIRO scientist and one of the founders of the Australian Conservation Foundation, discussing the field guide in the late 1960s, the field guide to be, because this is when Pizzey first started putting it together. Both Pizzey and Ratcliffe continually referred to its value as a means of promoting public appreciation of birds and hence their conservation

Russell McGregor:

In 1995, Gregg Borschmann interviewed Graham Pizzey for a National Library oral history project. Graham's daughter, Sarah Pizzey, kindly provided me with a transcript of that interview. At the end of a long discussion of his field guide, Graham observed that compiling it reinforced his conviction. I'm quoting him now, that the natural world is the absolute fundamental base. It's all our past. It's all our future. The natural world is the great truth. The one thing that we need to know about. I personally believe that it can answer most of our spiritual cravings. I'm more and more confirmed in this general view of the primacy of the natural world and its importance to us spiritually, as well as physically. To which the interviewer, Borschmann, responded, In that sense then, this book, this field guide was your hymn. It was your testament. Yes, said Pizzey. Thank you.

Luke Hickey:

Thanks, Russell. We now have time for some questions. As we're recording this presentation at the moment, if you do have a question, can you please wait for the microphone to be brought down just so that we can record it for the online audience to be able to hear it as well. But I'd now like to open up to the floor for any questions. Anyone? There must be some questions.

Russell McGregor:

I've left lots of time for questions.

Speaker 3:

Hello, Bill Curt is my name. I'm not here to ask a question, but to make a confession, a public confession. For Christmas 1960, I was given a copy of the 1959 edition of Cayley's book. In the following year, I wrote a school essay on bird watching, and this is in a rural school in Queensland. I think then the state education department inspector came around and the nuns must have had to prepare a portfolio of students work because the inspector came up to our classroom and wanted to meet the boy who'd written this lovely introductory paragraph, and it's only today that I'm admitting it was the first paragraph of Cayley's introduction.

Russell McGregor:

Thank you for that wonderful memory.

Speaker 4:

Hi, Luke, thanks for that. That was really so fascinating. I just got one question. I wondered, it seems like a very male history so far, and I know you've only just covered some short, small amount of the material that you've covered, but are there any sort of gendered aspects to birding that you will cover in the book?

Russell McGregor:

Yeah, certainly. The gender aspect is will certainly be covered. In what I just said, is just the one throwaway line about collecting being a very robust masculine adventure. But as I write more, there'll be more delving into the gender dimensions. Basically up until the Second World War, it was certainly a very male dominated activity in Australia. Interesting, that wasn't always the case overseas. In the United States, for example, birding at first was a predominantly female thing, then men came into it and strangely enough, came to dominate it.

Russell McGregor:

But in Australia it was from the outset, very male. There were a few women, like there's Ada Fletcher in Tasmania and some others. But after the second world war, I think we begin to get more of a change, and today I think that if membership of BirdLife and so forth is taken as an indicator, women slightly outnumber men in birding circles. But still at the sort of extreme end, twitching that is, male still well and truly predominate. Yeah. But among recreational birders, there has been since the second world war a drift toward greater gender balance and even perhaps like predominance of women.

Speaker 5:

Thanks for the talk Russell. I was tidying up, I suppose that's the word we use as we get older, all the junk that I'd accumulated over many, many years and out of one little box that had been tucked away for years and years came a little badge that I'd acquired when I was in primary school. It was my membership of the Gould League of Bird Lovers. And I have vague recollections of kind of how we got it at school. I think there was an interested teacher who kind of mass enrolled classes of kids in the Gould League. I'm not sure that anything came of it very much further, and I kind of continued to hear about it for years, and then it seemed to drop away entirely, but it was in those days, I guess, a fairly good kind of recruiting field for young people, boys and girls, to become interested in what was going on or flying... Pardon me. Flying around them. I just sort of wonder what has happened to it, whether it kind of features in your work at all and what its history is.

Russell McGregor:

Yep. Okay. Gould League of Bird Lovers certainly features in what I'm writing and researching. There's quite a lot of Gould League material here in the National Library. Founded in 1909, one of the founders was J.A Leach, the same guy as wrote the first field guide, which I gave some illustrations from. He wasn't the only, he was among the founders. There was a number of... It was founded in Victoria. Did you go to school in Victoria by any chance?

Speaker 5:

No. New South Wales.

Russell McGregor:

New South Wales. Okay. The heartland of the Gould League of Bird Lovers was always Victoria. It lasted longest there. It still survives today. It's no longer called the Gould League of Bird Lovers. As far as I know, I could be mistaken, it's called the Gould League. They cut the Bird Lovers bit out, I think in the late 60s, early 70s, as it took a broader conservational stance. It was initially... It was very much a conservationist oriented body. The idea was to encourage kids to appreciate birds and thereby conserve them. That's the basic motivation behind it all.

Russell McGregor:

In the 60s, I think late 60s, early 70s, it became a broader based conservationist organisation for children and it dropped off Bird Lovers off the end. But I think, of Bird Lovers has a wonderful sort of charm to it, myself. Actually in the first version of this talk that I put together, there was a section on the Gould League of Bird Lovers, but then other things came along, it got dropped, I'm afraid. But yeah, the body still exists and I think it was quite influential at one time, particularly in Victoria, where it was strongest. Eventually it got to, not sure about all states, most it was active for a short while in Queensland, for longer in New South Wales, came late to Western Australia, but it did get there, South Australia, I'm not sure Tasmania. I'm not sure

Speaker 6:

Just on that, colleagues might correct me, but our 2019 Fellow, Andrea Gaynor, who was looking at childhood and the outdoor... My recollection is that she did a lot on the Gould League, so it's quite likely we've got a recording of her talk on our website. So within a fairly short period, we've had quite deep research into children and bird watching and nature. Yeah.

Russell McGregor:

Because the project I'm doing, I will be looking at children's involvement in bird watching, but that's not my focus. I'm really looking more at adults, but necessarily I look at children also, and that's where the Gould League has a very big prominent place. And also of course, many birders began as Gould Leaguers.

Luke Hickey:

Are there any questions?

Speaker 7:

What is the most exciting bird that you've seen in your bird watching that's given you real buzz?

Russell McGregor:

All of them.

Speaker 7:

Any really rare ones that you are very proud of?

Russell McGregor:

The most exciting. The most... Yeah. I'm not sure what’s the most exciting. No, I'm really not sure what the most exci... I suppose, in some ways, but this sort of goes back to what... I was having to get a chat with Luke before and he asked me what my favorite bird was, and again, there's many favourites, but I did nominate one, the white-throated gerygone, largely because of its amazing song. But Luke told me that his son, I think it's your son. Yeah. His favourite bird is the Cassowary. So if you're asking for one of the most exciting birds I've seen, I guess Cassowary would be among them, partly because when you're close up to a Cassowary, you realise these are fearsome animals, and so it's exciting, not just that you're seeing a bird, that's not very common, but it's a bird that can do you real damage. So in that sense, maybe a Cassowary is the most exciting.

Luke Hickey:

Any other questions?

Speaker 9:

Well, unfortunately I didn't bring this book with me, but just recently someone provided me, and I don't know who it was, with a wonderful book called The Lore of the Lyrebird, and it was republished many, many times after its original appearance, I think in the 1950s.

Russell McGregor:

No. Before. Ambrose Pratt is the author.

Speaker 9:

1930s then-

Russell McGregor:

30s. Yeah.

Speaker 9:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I've watched and listened to lyrebirds a great deal, but it wasn't until this last summer that I actually heard their own call. I've heard all the imitations of other birds, but I was in the rainforest down the coast here and I heard this incredible boing noise. I can't give it proper...

Russell McGregor:

Not being a lyrebird. Yeah.

Speaker 9:

But it was quite astonishing to me and then there happened to be one other bird watcher, and I said, what the hell's that noise out there? He said, it's a lyrebird. So it's quite unusual, because I've been a bird watcher since the 60s. So I've never heard its own call until this year.

Russell McGregor:

Okay. You've been a bird watcher, you say, since the 1960s? Oh, okay. But yeah, lyrebirds, sometimes with the mimics it's hard to know what's its natural call and what's the mimicked calls. But they're certainly masters of mimicry.

Philip:

Hello? Is that on? Yes. Interesting to see one of your quotes you put up there talked about an alternate name and seeing the lyrebird has come up. One of those quotes talked about lyretail. I've never seen the word lyretail ever used, but really it's a better name. Lyrebird is a bit uninteresting and vague, but lyretail is more descriptive and interesting. And a little comment on that, of course, lyrebirds mimic as well as give a lot of their own calls, and they intersperse them. When they're doing their important stuff, is their own sounds, all the mimicry is fill in.

Russell McGregor:

Yeah. Thanks, Philip. Yeah. Lyretail was a name fairly common use early in the 20th century, possibly before too. It's gone through various... I mean, lyrebird was used at the same time, because we're talking about a time before, I remember there was even less standardisation of bird names as what there is today. And I guess lyretail is a more descriptive... But don't suggest it to the committee that Jeffrey sits on, so we can have another name change. I'm quite happy with superb lyrebird, Albert's lyrebird. And for the non-birders among you, vernacular names of birds are things that, if names are things, are issues over which some birders get quite heated about the vernacular names of birds, what should we call them and why? And they also... The official or recognised vernacular undergo a constant process of change, just like scientific names do too for that matter. But yeah, it is an issue of some heated debate among certain segments of the bird community.

Speaker 9:

Just to finish the... Oh, sorry. Is there another suggestion though that the lyrebird's own call replicates the twanging of a lyre, the musical instrument?

Russell McGregor:

But the name certainly comes from its tail shape. I think it's quite clear that the name... Well, the name comes from the lyrebird's tail being arranged in a position that it would never naturally hold its tail in. But arranged in that manner, it resembles an ancient Greek lyre. That's why it was named that. But it had other... I mean, in the early days it had the other names as well, native pheasant and all sorts of things. It was a whole heap of names. Okay. Thank you.

Luke Hickey:

Great. Thank you, Russell. Unfortunately, that is all the time that we have for this afternoon, but thank you for taking us on a ramble, in your words, through your studies and through the work that you've done here at the library, but also for putting us in touch with the wild at home. And I know its one of the things that as a youngster, my parents gave me some books. I didn't plagiarise any for school assignments, but I'm glad we could act as that sort of confessional for you today, Bill, but being able to span across generations, I think is the other really neat thing that it teaches us.

Luke Hickey:

A couple of plugs before we leave, for the keen researchers amongst our audience, I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that our fellowships and scholars program for 2023 is open now. If you're an experienced researcher, a PhD student, creative writer, artist, or folk practitioner, and you wish to use our collections to advance your projects, as you've seen, our collections are pretty wide ranging and amazing, there may be a fellowship or a scholarship that's suitable for you. So you can check those details on our website, on the National Library of Australia website.

Luke Hickey:

And for those of you who are feeling inspired again by the love of birds, a little plug for our bookshop, make sure you stop past the bookshop, particularly to pick up a copy of the 60th anniversary edition of Judith Wrights, Poems in Birds. There's a little display in the shop there. Not only are these poems brilliant pieces of work that span back, but also the illustrations come from some of the national libraries collections as well, and is part of our publishing program. On that note we'll wrap up for today, but please join me again in thanking Russell McGregor for today's fascinating presentation.